Critical Reflection on Creative Collaborations: Imagining the Image and Wording the Work

This article is based on a presentation at Great Writing 2010, the international creative writing conference held in Bangor University entitled 'Imagining The Image and Wording The Work: The Creative and Critical in Painting and Writing in the Twenty-First Century.' The paper examined the creative forms of painting and jewellery making to see if these processes - understood in purely creative/product terms - could be applied to and compared to writing - traditionally understood in creative/critical terms. The creative process and the resulting application through a series of interactive exercises experimented with the notion that there is no waste in creativity and that the collaborative process is circular. The audience, like the writer and the artist, became both spectator and practitioner. The authors critically reflect on the experiences of collaborating in the research, the presentation and the collaboration with the audience members to whom the presentation was made and with whom several interactive exercises were performed. Both the images of the paintings and the jewellery as well as a selection of audience and Karen Lee Street's texts are included. It is hoped that in critically reflecting on the creative process further, inspiration and ideas for collaborative work in terms of both teaching and writing practice can be gleaned.